Welcome to our book review site go-pdf.online!
You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
Syntactic Features and the Limits of Syntactic Change
This volume brings together the latest diachronic research on syntactic features and their role in restricting syntactic change. The chapters explore topics relating to all three domains of the clause as well as issues in methodology and modelling, drawing on data from a range of languages and dialects.
The Determinants of Diachronic Stability
While much of the literature has focused on explaining diachronic variation and change, the fact that sometimes change does not seem to happen has received much less attention. The current volume unites ten contributions that look for the determinants of diachronic stability, mainly in the areas of morphology and (morpho)syntax. The relevant question is approached from different angles, both empirical and theoretical. Empirically, the contributions deal with the absence of change where one may expect it, uncover underlying stability where traditionally diachronic change was postulated, and, inversely, superficial stability that disguises underlying change. Determining factors ranging from internal causes to language contact are explored. Theoretically, the questions of whether stable variation is possible, and how it can be modeled are addressed. The volume will be of interest to linguists working on the causes of language change, and to scholars working on the history of Germanic, Romance, and Sinitic languages.
Syntactic architecture and its consequences III
This volume collects novel contributions to comparative generative linguistics that “rethink” existing approaches to an extensive range of phenomena, domains, and architectural questions in linguistic theory. At the heart of the contributions is the tension between descriptive and explanatory adequacy which has long animated generative linguistics and which continues to grow thanks to the increasing amount and diversity of data available to us. The chapters develop novel insights into a number of core syntactic phenomena, such as the structure of and variation in diathesis, alignment types, case and agreement splits, and the syntax of null elements. Many of these contributions show the influence of research by Ian Roberts and collaborators and they provide varied perspectives on current research in synchronic and diachronic comparative syntax.
Diachronic Corpora, Genre, and Language Change
This volume provides a state-of-the-art overview of the intersecting fields of corpus linguistics, historical linguistics, and genre-based studies of language usage. Papers in this collection are devoted to presenting relevant methods pertinent to corpus-based studies of the connection between genre and language change, linguistic changes that occur in particular genres, and specific diachronic phenomena that are influenced by genre factors to greater and lesser degrees. Data are drawn from a number of languages, and the scope of the studies presented here is both short- and long-term, covering cases of recent change as well as more long-term alterations.
Continuity and Variation in Germanic and Romance
This volume offers a range of synchronic and diachronic case studies in comparative Germanic and Romance morphosyntax. These two language families, spoken by over a billion people today, have played a central role in linguistic research, but many significant questions remain about the relationship between them. Following an introduction that sets out the methodological, empirical, and theoretical background to the book, the volume is divided into three parts that deal with the morphosyntax of subjects and the inflectional layer; inversion, discourse pragmatics, and the left periphery; and continuity and variation beyond the clause. The contributors adopt a diverse range of approaches, making use of the latest digitized corpora and presenting a mixture of well-known and under-studied data from standard and non-standard Germanic and Romance languages. Many of the chapters challenge received wisdom about the relationship between these two important language families. The volume will be an indispensable resource for researchers and students in the fields of Germanic and Romance linguistics, historical and comparative linguistics, and morphosyntax.
The History of Negation in the Languages of Europe and the Mediterranean
This is the second book in a two-volume comparative history of negation in the languages of Europe and the Mediterranean. The work integrates typological, general, and theoretical research, documents patterns and directions of change in negation across languages, and examines the linguistic and social factors that lie behind such changes. The aim of both volumes is to set out an integrated framework for understanding the syntax of negation and how it changes. While the first volume (OUP, 2013) presented linked case studies of particular languages and language groups, this second volume constructs a holistic approach to explaining the patterns of historical change found in the languages of Eu...
Cycles in Language Change
This volume explores the multiple aspects of cyclical syntactic change from a wide range of empirical perspectives. The notion of 'linguistic cycle' has long been recognized as being relevant to the description of many processes of language change. In grammaticalization, a given linguistic form loses its lexical meaning - and sometimes some of its phonological content - and then gradually weakens until it ultimately vanishes. This change becomes cyclical when the grammaticalized form is replaced by an innovative item, which can then develop along exactly the same pathway. But cyclical changes have also been observed in language change outside of grammaticalization proper. The chapters in thi...
Referential Null Subjects in Early English
This book offers a large-scale quantitative investigation of referential null subjects as they occur in Old, Middle, and Early Modern English. Using corpus linguistic methods, and drawing on five corpora of early English, it empirically examines the occurrence of subjectless finite clauses in more than 500 early English texts, spanning nearly 850 years. On the basis of this substantial data, Kristian A. Rusten re-evaluates previous conflicting claims concerning the occurrence and distribution of null subjects in Old English. He explores the question of whether the earliest stage of English can be considered a canonical or partial pro-drop language, and provides an empirical examination of th...
Relativsätze im Mittelniederdeutschen
Trotz eines zunehmenden Forschungsinteresses an der mittelniederdeutschen Syntax weist dieses Gebiet noch immer deutliche Forschungsdesiderate auf. Insbesondere umfassende variationssensitive Analysen stehen für zahlreiche syntaktische Phänomene im Mittelniederdeutschen noch aus, so auch für den mittelniederdeutschen Relativsatz. Aufgrund der Heterogenität im Bereich der Relativsatzdefinitionen wird eine für die Studie eigens erarbeitete Begriffsbestimmung des Relativsatzes vorgestellt, auf dessen Basis die Relativsätze in einem Korpus aus sechzehn mittelniederdeutschen Texten ermittelt und analysiert werden. In einem induktiven Vorgehen in Verbindung mit einem strikt deskriptiven Zugr...
Linguistic Corpora and Big Data in Spanish and Portuguese
In recent decades, corpus linguistics has experienced tremendous development in the Hispanic world, along two opposite but complementary approaches: increase in corpus size (corpus linguistics as Big Data) and improvement in document selection and data annotation (corpus linguistics as High Quality Data). The first approach has led to the creation of massive corpora such as EsTenTen; at the same time, it has promoted the use of the web and social networks as corpora. The second perspective gives rise to specialized corpora such as Post Scriptum or Oralia Diacrónica del español (ODE). The contributions gathered in this volume combine both methods in order to exploit their advantages and to overcome their possible limitations. On the one hand, it addresses the creation and design of small corpora focused on data quality; on the other hand, it offers case studies that make use of both specialized corpora and massive data extracted from the web. Highlighting the complementary nature of both methods is the main idea of this book.
